About six months ago, graduation season began. College seniors and graduate students went through several rites of passage, like getting their caps and gowns, handing in their theses and going to the financial aid office to undergo student loan exit counseling. Students partaking in the latter activity were told that on graduation day, they would not only receive diplomas but also a ticking time bomb: Their student loan grace period would expire in several months, and they’d need to start repaying their debt.

Most people who finance their educations take out federal student loans, many of which don’t immediately need to be repaid after they’re disbursed: Subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford Loans have a six-month grace period, and Perkins Loans have a nine-month grace period. (PLUS Loans do not have a grace period.)

If you’re coming up on repayment and think you might not be able to afford your loans, don’t wait to figure out a game plan.

“A lot of the young adults we deal with are often bitter about the situation that they’re in,” said Andrew Josuweit CEO and co-founder of Studentloanhero.com. “They may not have gotten the job they thought they’d be getting or the income. … A lot of them are having trouble making those payments.”

Federal student loan borrowers have a lot of options at their disposal, so you should be able to find a way to stay financially afloat while meeting your debt obligations.

Connect With Your Servicer

When your student loan was disbursed, you received a notification from your student loan servicer. Ideally, you’ve already set up an online account with your servicer (perhaps you’ve even started paying your loan interest), but if not, now is the time to do it. Your loan may have switched servicers between the time it was disbursed and now, so check the National Student Loan Data System for this information. You’ll need your financial aid PIN, and you can get a new one if you’ve lost track of yours.

Once you’ve logged into your accounts, take note of your monthly payments, and create a plan for making them (if you haven’t yet). Establishing an automatic payment may help you stay on schedule. Set reminders to make sure the payment came out of your account as planned, especially after the first one. Pay extra close attention when you start this process — you don’t want to pay late fees or become delinquent on the loan.

Get Your Free Credit Score & Monitoring

Figure Out Your Budget

Now that you know how much you owe, take that amount out of your monthly paycheck — whatever you have left is what you can divvy up into saving and spending categories (do yourself a favor and start saving early).

After doing this, you may find your current lifestyle to be too expensive to sustain. Think of everything that’s adjustable in your budget, like rent, food and entertainment, and start trimming. If you’re already spread thin, see if you can reduce your student loan payments.

Explore Your Options

First of all, if you’re returning to school or entering active military duty before the end of your grace period, your grace period will be extended. If you consolidate your student loans during your grace period, you begin repayment about two months after the Direct Consolidation Loan is paid out.

If none of the above applies to you, start looking at different payment plans available through the Department of Education, which can help you work out more affordable monthly payments. You may end up paying more in interest over the life of the loan, but it’s crucial to make these loans affordable from the beginning.

Forbearance and deferment may also be an option, depending on your circumstances. You should also check to see if your line of work qualifies you for student loan forgiveness programs. No matter your situation, if you have federal student loans, you should be able to work something out to avoid defaulting on your loans. Still, the federal student loan default rate was 13.7% last year, which seems to indicate consumers may not be aware of the options available to them.

“Essentially every federal student loan borrower is eligible,” Josuweit said. “You just have to talk to your servicer.”

If you have private loans, you’ll have less flexibility, so Josuweit recommends reducing your federal loan payments as much as possible so you can stay current on all your loans. Defaulting will only make your situation more difficult, which Josuweit knows from experience.

“I defaulted on my student loans a few years ago,” he said, noting that it killed his credit score. “I can’t refinance my student loans.”

If you stay on top of your loan obligations, your education debt could actually help you build credit and open up refinancing options in the future. Take extra care to make sure all your loan payments reach your account on time and that your payment history has accurately been reported to the credit bureaus. Make a habit of getting your free annual credit reports and reviewing your credit scores every month — you can get two credit scores for free on Credit.com.

More on Student Loans:

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Sign up for our Credit Report Card and receive the latest tips & advice from our team of 50+ credit and money experts as well as a FREE Credit Score and action plan. Sign up now.

Christine DiGangi is a reporter and editor for Credit.com, covering a variety of personal finance topics. Her writing has been featured on USA Today, MSN, Yahoo! Finance and The New York Times International Weekly, among other outlets. More by Christine DiGangi

Comments on articles and responses to those comments are not provided or commissioned by a bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by a bank advertiser. It is not a bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Please note that our comments are moderated, so it may take a little time before you see them on the page. Thanks for your patience.

The offers that appear on Credit.com’s website are from companies from which Credit.com receives compensation. This compensation may influence the selection, appearance, and order of appearance of the offers listed on the website. However, this compensation also facilitates the provision by Credit.com of certain services to you at no charge. The website does not include all financial services companies or all of their available product and service offerings.

Editorial content is not provided by any issuer. Any opinions, analyses, reviews, or recommendations expressed here are those of the author's alone, and have not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any issuer.

Certain credit cards and other financial products mentioned in this and other articles on Credit.com News & Advice may also be offered through Credit.com product pages, and Credit.com will be compensated if our users apply for and ultimately sign up for any of these cards or products. However, this relationship does not result in any preferential editorial treatment.

Hello, Reader!

Thanks for checking out Credit.com. We hope you find the site and the journalism we produce useful. We wanted to take some time to tell you a bit about ourselves.

Our People

The Credit.com editorial team is staffed by a team of editors and reporters, each with many years of financial reporting experience. We’ve worked for places like the New York Times, American Banker, Frontline, TheStreet.com, Business Insider, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC and many others. We also employ a few freelancers and more than 50 contributors (these are typically subject matter experts from the worlds of finance, academia, politics, business and elsewhere).

Our Reporting

We take great pains to ensure that the articles, video and graphics you see on Credit.com are thoroughly reported and fact-checked. Each story is read by two separate editors, and we adhere to the highest editorial standards. We’re not perfect, however, and if you see something that you think is wrong, please email us at editorial team [at] credit [dot] com,

The Credit.com editorial team is committed to providing our readers and viewers with sound, well-reported and understandable information designed to inform and empower. We won’t tell you what to do. We will, however, do our best to explain the consequences of various actions, thereby arming you with the information you need to make decisions that are in your best interests. We also write about things relating to money and finance we think are interesting and want to share.

In addition to appearing on Credit.com, our articles are syndicated to dozens of other news sites. We have more than 100 partners, including MSN, ABC News, CBS News, Yahoo, Marketwatch, Scripps, Money Magazine and many others. This network operates similarly to the Associated Press or Reuters, except we focus almost exclusively on issues relating to personal finance. These are not advertorial or paid placements, rather we provide these articles to our partners in most cases for free. These relationships create more awareness of Credit.com in general and they result in more traffic to us as well.

Our Business Model

Credit.com’s journalism is largely supported by an e-commerce business model. Rather than rely on revenue from display ad impressions, Credit.com maintains a financial marketplace separate from its editorial pages. When someone navigates to those pages, and applies for a credit card, for example, Credit.com will get paid what is essentially a finder’s fee if that person ends up getting the card. That doesn’t mean, however, that our editorial decisions are informed by the products available in our marketplace. The editorial team chooses what to write about and how to write about it independently of the decisions and priorities of the business side of the company. In fact, we maintain a strict and important firewall between the editorial and business departments. Our mission as journalists is to serve the reader, not the advertiser. In that sense, we are no different from any other news organization that is supported by ad revenue.

Visitors to Credit.com are also able to register for a free Credit.com account, which gives them access to a tool called The Credit Report Card. This tool provides users with two free credit scores and a breakdown of the information in their Experian credit report, updated twice monthly. Again, this tool is entirely free, and we mention that frequently in our articles, because we think that it’s a good thing for users to have access to data like this. Separate from its educational value, there is also a business angle to the Credit Report Card. Registered users can be matched with products and services for which they are most likely to qualify. In other words, if you register and you find that your credit is less than stellar, Credit.com won’t recommend a high-end platinum credit card that requires an excellent credit score You’d likely get rejected, and that’s no good for you or Credit.com. You’d be no closer to getting a product you need, there’d be a wasted inquiry on your credit report, and Credit.com wouldn’t get paid. These are essentially what are commonly referred to as "targeted ads" in the world of the Internet. Despite all of this, however, even if you never apply for any product, the Credit Report Card will remain free, and none of this will impact how the editorial team reports on credit and credit scores.

Our Owners

Credit.com is owned by Progrexion Holdings Inc. which is the owner and administrator of a number of business related to credit and credit repair, including CreditRepair.com, and eFolks. In addition, Progrexion also provides services to Lexington Law Firm as a third party provider. Despite being owned by Progrexion, it is not the role of the Credit.com editorial team to advocate the use of the company’s other services. In articles, reporters may mention credit repair as an option, for example, but we’ll also be sure to note the various alternatives to that service. Furthermore, you may see ads for credit repair services on Credit.com, but the editorial team isn’t responsible for the creation or implementation of those ads, anymore than reporters for the New York Times or Washington Post are responsible for the ads on their sites.

Your Stories

Lastly, much of what we do is informed by our own experiences as well as the experiences of our readers. We want to tell your stories if you’re interested in sharing them. Please email us at story ideas [at] credit [dot] com with ideas or visit us on Facebook or Twitter.